ip.access Ensures Code Quality in Cellular Base Stations with Coverity Development Testing

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Coverity, Inc., the development testing leader, today announced that ip.access, a pioneering developer of picocell and femtocell mobile technology, is ensuring product quality and accelerating time to market by using Coverity® Static Analysis as its development testing solution. Development testing is an integral part of ip.access' comprehensive software quality standard applied across a supply chain of third party code suppliers and internal and offshore development teams. Since implementing Coverity to test over 4 million lines of code in development, ip.access has been able to accelerate its delivery schedules by 15 percent by finding and fixing defects early in the cycle.

ip.access manufactures small cellular base stations to help mobile operators solve coverage and capacity problems for business and consumer users. Found in 60 mobile networks around the world, ip.access' solutions help to increase data throughput on 2G and 3G mobile networks so users can communicate or stream multi-media content more effectively.

"Business users and consumers demand a high level of reliability and availability from mobile operators, which means we must ensure there are no software defects in our products that might impact performance or availability," said Jason Cooper, Engineering Team Lead at ip.access. "With multiple suppliers contributing to our femtocell and picocell solutions, this uncompromising approach to defects has to apply to every line of code – whether it is written by an ip.access developer, an outsourced partner or a third party software vendor."

ip.access relies on a number of internal teams and external development partners to deliver new features and meet increasing time-to-market pressures. To ensure its products meet customer quality expectations, ip.access measures code quality across all development teams early in the software development lifecycle using a continuous integration development process founded on development testing.

Using Coverity Static Analysis, ip.access verifies the quality of an average 4 million lines of code submitted nightly from its own offshore development team, its outsourcing partner and other third party code suppliers. Using Coverity's robust analysis and defect management workflow, ip.access is able to identify, and work with its partners to fix any critical software defects within thirty days of initial code submission, in accordance with its SLAs and rapid delivery schedule requirements.

"With outsourcing, you immediately encounter challenges around consistent results. Our products cannot suffer any downtime, which means we have to be confident that external code is defect-free," continued Cooper. "We needed a faster and more effective way to get all code to the same level of quality and measure the performance of our suppliers. Coverity helps us achieve this by providing developers with pre-defined workflows to help them maximize and prioritize their time so they can quickly find and fix critical defects."

With Coverity Static Analysis, ip.access has also been able to meet the stringent service level agreements for 99.999% availability imposed by its external customers.

"Today's development organizations are a mix of geographically distributed internal teams and third party software suppliers, which raises the importance of continuous visibility and consistent measurement of code quality and security, regardless of the source," states Jennifer Johnson, VP of Marketing at Coverity. "ip.access has demonstrated its commitment to innovation, product quality and customer satisfaction by adopting development testing into its process and across its software supply chain."  

Coverity Static Analysis leverages sophisticated analysis techniques for finding and eliminating hard-to-spot defects in software code as it is being written, when defects are the easiest and least expensive to fix.

Online Resources

• Read the ip.access case study
• Learn more about development testing
• Learn more about Coverity® Static Analysis
• Follow Coverity on Twitter
• Visit the Software Integrity Blog

About ip.access
Based in Cambridge, UK, ip.access ltd (www.ipaccess.com) is a leading manufacturer of cost-effective picocell and femtocell infrastructure solutions for GSM, GPRS, EDGE and 3G. These solutions bring IP and cellular technologies together to drive down costs and increase coverage and capacity of mobile networks. ABI Research ranks ip.access as the world's number 1 picocell vendor; its nanoGSM® and nano3G™ picocell solutions provide 2G and 3G coverage and capacity for offices, shops and (using satellite backhaul) passenger aircraft, ships and remote rural areas. nanoGSM is the world's most deployed picocell, with live installations in more than 50 networks around the world and growing. ip.access is also the company behind the multi-award winning Oyster 3G™ femtocell technology, which dramatically improves the user experience for 3G services at home. Oyster 3G is the core femtocell technology in AT&T's 3G MicroCell. ip.access counts Scottish Equity Partners, Rothschild Gestion, Intel Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, ADC, Cisco, Qualcomm and Motorola Ventures among its shareholders.

About Coverity
Coverity, Inc. (www.coverity.com), the development testing leader, is the trusted standard for companies that need to protect their brands and bottom lines from software failures. More than 1,100 Coverity customers use Coverity's development testing suite of products to automatically test source code for software defects that could lead to product crashes, unexpected behavior, security breaches, or catastrophic failure. Coverity is a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco. Coverity is funded by Foundation Capital and Benchmark Capital. Follow us on Twitter or check out our blog.

SOURCE Coverity, Inc.